Summer shivered beneath a storm, an errant storm, lost from winter’s flock. The land no longer was light-bathed, yet had to content itself with mean withering shafts. Perhaps the optimistic eye would see them as balustrades, a heavenly staircase beamed into warmer days. Yet goosebumps don’t lie. Birdsong was mute. Thunder defacto-deafened even the most open ear. Every bright hue washed dim. Every smile fell flat. It wasn’t supposed to be here, but it was, and that was that. Shutters closed. Doors met their catch, bolts and chains too. One cannot churlishly tell the sky to recheck the calendar. It does not know. It does not care. And, so we too took cover, what else was there to do?
The clock, knife hands juddering, cut the meanest slivers of time. It minced the barking of dogs and the holy choir to the same pulpy noise-trash. As an ever peeled eye, it glared. Cold it was upon a cold wall all winter long. For the warmer seasons, it cared not a jot. To the beauty of flowers was blind. To the chirping of baby birds it was deaf. Alas, it wasn’t mute and its bland ticking tocks came with a regimented abruptness. It was a beat never to bare the impertinence of sweet lyrics. Its ticks were its pennies and, as Scrooge, to cooly count them was its raison d’être.
His sea-foam eyes fogged in grief as he reclined upon the couch, a grief that spanned callous years, per-chance a decade or three. The dirty mullioned windows stole his attention in full, its beams rotting at their leisure, its panes pollution smeared. I imagined them to whisper, the man and that imposing window, to hold the most sympathetic of communions. Then all at once, ever so fast, he reaffirmed my gaze and held it strong, as if it were my very hands he clasped. His eyes glossed as a glacier in summer heat. I prayed, how I prayed, he’d welcome these sparks and fan these flames. For if his inner hearth could roar once more, he’d be restored and lament no more.
The wind was a zealot, a follower of destruction’s code. In hellacious mood it blew, it slew, it cut in blindest rage. Such was the insanity of that storm, that hurricane. There ne’er was a scream so wild. There ne’er was a torrent so thick. There ne’er was a cloud bank so oily-dense as that skyward barricade. Though ere long we assumed it’d pass, such violence is ne’er born to last long, it was a rent to soul and heart, a wrench of trauma’s hand.
In a spectral shuddering cry, coldest metal wheels screech-smacked rails that were both chains and cage. It was one of those nights that imprisoned the sun. It was one of those nights that robbed its rays not for solace, yet for greed. It was one of those nights that sent a pseudo-dawn, a pseudo-dawn of unforgiving fluorescent harshness. The whole world was underground the day it rolled into every station. Peeling paint, shattered grime-smothered glass, worn out numbers so scratched and dim. From the doors came phantoms in well starched shadows, pressed, ironed, rustling. Clomp. Clomp. All around was a crowd of spectral jack-boots. The wind was not wind, yet whispers that twisted into almost-words. That train vanished only to arrive again and thus the night rolled on and on.
A cashmere butterfly alighted upon a bloom, a bloom of dollar roundness and of dollar-hue. Above it shone a daytime moon, for the sun though flambeaux bright was quite out of sight: cosseted, cosy, ensconced within a fresh wash of cloud. And, then in greatest number, as if each were summoned by a different blossom, a flock fluttered down. Upon that green disc, they were nature’s living crown. There was something so transporting in the expanse of that idle post-noon: a dream, a wish most pleasant, a sauntering sense of wonder. And so it was with blithest serenity that the advancing lit hours bowed to starlight’s entreaty.